Cut Me Open and the Light Streams Out
by foreverwriting9
Summary: A look at some conversations that Beckett has with her therapist regarding Castle.
1. Cut Me Open and the Light Streams Out

Beckett sits on the well-worn couch and stares at the man sitting across from her. He's patient, so he sits and waits, and stares right back at her. The couch creaks slightly as Beckett adjusts herself, pulling her knees closer to her body.

(This moment manages to make her feel like a small child with silly nightmares.)

"I remember everything."

This is how it begins.

XXX

"Castle told me to walk away from my mother's case." Beckett doesn't like this, isn't used to it, this opening up to a man she hardly knows.

"You refused." It's not a question, simply a statement, and Beckett realizes that this man seems to be able to read her almost as well as Castle.

"He wanted to save me."

"You didn't want to be saved." Again, it's a statement, and this irks Beckett; a man who's paid to sit and intermittently ask questions and doodle in a notebook shouldn't be able to understand her as though he's known her for years. Beckett sits up a little straighter. "I'm a grown woman in a heavily male profession, I don't need anyone to save me."

The only sound in the room is the scratch of pen on paper.

XXX

"And Castle kept telling us to be on the lookout for some midgets, or a green woman, or possibly even Glinda, because there was a chance she'd gone rogue." The silence stretches then, because Beckett realizes that she's spent half an hour talking about Castle, and that her cheeks hurt from smiling.

The pen stops moving for a moment, and he looks up at her with a small smile. "He's good for you, Kate."

She's always Kate here, never Beckett (she's not sure if she likes that or not).

"Yes," she says, her hands clasped together so tightly it almost hurts. "I suppose he is."

XXX

"I dreamt about Castle for weeks after the shooting."

He doesn't write this down immediately, simply stares back at her, interested. "Bad dreams or good dreams?"

Beckett shrugs, settling back into the soft cushions of the couch. "A little of both I guess."

"Care to share one with me?"

She grips her knee for a split second, panicked, regretting that she mentioned her dreams at all. A deep breath, and then she plunges in with only a mild amount of hesitation. "I had a dream where he was the one who was shot, and I was the one lying with him on the grass telling _him_ not to leave _me_. And," she trails off for a moment, her gaze zig-zagging around the room (because if she makes eye contact with him now the story will fall apart, _she'll_ fall apart and tell him about the other dreams. The dreams where Castle is killed in some disturbingly macabre way that makes her question her mental health, or the other, _other_ dreams where she drags Castle into a supply closet, grabs him by the back of the neck, and kisses him until they're both practically blue in the face).

Her throat is too dry. "And then, the paramedics come, but they won't help him. They stand off to the side and watch us both lying on the ground, and when I tell them to help Castle, they just shrug and tell me it's my job."

He nods slowly, still watching her with an interest that's hard to ignore. Then, he begins writing on his notepad, his pen dancing across the paper.

He almost misses what she adds next.

"I never save him, I don't know how."

XXX

"I think I love him," she says it while looking out the window, staring at the dark clouds that hang over the city.

"Who?" (He knows the answer to this question, but he needs her to say it out loud.) His voice matches his eyes. Soft and warm and gentle, never probing like she first expected him to sound like.

"Castle," she says, and still won't meet his gaze.

"And does he love you?"

Beckett turns and walks back to the couch. "Yes," she sinks into the cushions and stares at her hands for a moment. "He told me when I was lying on the ground in the cemetery, and then I told him I couldn't remember...but I do, everyday."

She knows what he's going to ask before he even speaks.

"Then why did you lie to him?"

"Because I'm scared." The words almost get stuck in her throat.

"Of what?"

"A lot of things," she says, and that makes her feel silly, because she's a homicide detective, and since when has she been afraid of things?


	2. Cut Me Open and I'm Still Bleeding

"So," he says, tapping his pen against his knee, "what bothers you most right now?"

"The dreams." The nightmares, the short, periodic daydreams that occur when she's sitting by herself staring off into space. Their subjects vary. Sometimes, she simply relives the shooting as it happened. Other times, (and these are the dreams that haunt her most of all) her subconscious twists the scenario and she becomes a bystander.

Ryan, Esposito, Lanie, her father, Montgomery, and (of course) Castle. She has plenty of nightmares in which each of them figures prominently.

"And what do you do when you wake up from these dreams?"

Beckett adjusts herself on the couch, thinking. "I read, or watch TV," she pauses, tangling her fingers together and watching the lines on her hands match up to one another. "Sometimes I call someone." She adds that as almost an afterthought, but she can tell by the soft look he gives her that he knows this is the most important distraction from her dreams.

"Castle."

"Yes." The fact that he can figure this out no longer disturbs her.

"Does that help?"

"Most of the time, yes."

(But there are other times when Castle's voice doesn't help to chase away Beckett's dreams, and she's left lying between cold sheets with the lingering images of blood-spattered grass behind her closed eyes.)

XXX

"I spent a few weeks up at my dad's cabin, after I was released from the hospital."

"Doing what?"

"Thinking," she says, then, after a moment adds, "reading."

He nods and jots something down on his notepad. "Castle's new book?"

"Among other things."

What she doesn't tell him is that she read _Heat Rises_ half a dozen times, and that her only other reading materials consisted of an old magazine and _The Little Engine That Could_.

"And what did you spend your time thinking about?"

"Work, whether or not I would-could-go back."

He leans back, making his chair creak loudly. "What helped you make your decision?"

"_Heat Rises_," Beckett admits, running her hands across one of the couch cushions and picking at a loose string, "and _The Little Engine That Could_."

XXX

Beckett settles back into the couch cushions, pulling a pillow onto her lap and squeezing it. "If I think back hard enough I can remember life before Castle," she says it softly, as though she's simply thinking out loud.

"And?"

She answers by almost changing the subject. "Montgomery told me once that he kept Castle around because I have more fun with him."

He nods slowly, thoughtfully. "Is that true?"

Beckett flashes back to every alien-CIA-butler-themed conspiracy theory Castle has ever thrown at her and smiles. "Yes."

"So life before Castle was-"

"More serious and coffee-less."

"You wouldn't go back." It's a rhetorical statement, because he can see the answer written plainly on her face.

(She answers anyway.) "No, I don't think I would."

XXX

"Castle's books helped me make it through my mother's murder." Beckett admits it slowly, drawing the words out much longer than is actually necessary.

He looks up at her with a slight look of surprise (he never expected that their history went back _that_ far). "Does he know that?" he asks, picking up his pen and clicking it a few times.

"No."

"Maybe you should tell him."

XXX

"Sometimes he can just be childish, and immature, and..." Beckett's tirade tapers off as she suddenly finds herself at a lost for other adjectives (in part because the list of adjectives describing Castle is so long and varied that it makes her head spin).

"And that's part of why you keep him around." He looks up from his notepad, and softly taps his pen against the paper. He watches, and waits.

Beckett nods once.

"That's part of why you love him." He says it in a softer voice, gauging her reaction carefully.

She stares back at him calmly. "Yes." The word settles around her, coating the floors, the couch, and her shoulders.

(The admission doesn't make the room crumble around her, and it doesn't make her head hurt. Instead, it fills her stomach with the pleasant, warm tingling of butterflies, and she wonders when her reactions to heart-felt admissions like that suddenly changed.)


End file.
